The Gaslamp Killer Has Near-Death Experience

Electronic musician The Gaslamp Killer had an accident that had him hours away from death and has left him without a spleen and with “A dozen staples suture his chest from belly button to breastplate.” He has also been forced to cancel the rest of his Summer plans. We wish him a speedy recovery. He told the story of the accident to Jeff Weiss of LA Weekly:

How exactly did this happen?
I’d gone to [Hit + Run art collective head] Brandy Flower’s house to watch the Superman bootleg. Everybody fell asleep and I decided to call it a day and get my scooter out of the garage.

I started going down this hill and the wind took my hat, so I removed one hand to grab the hat and tried to squeeze the brakes–but I was squeezing the front brakes and flipped my whole shit.

I was literally driving three minutes away. I don’t use that scooter for anything other than recreational Highland Park visits. It’s not like I’m some fucking motorcycle speed demon. The thing is electric; it goes forty. But, it’s pretty fucking heavy. It flew on top of me and I was going downhill. And it felt like when a super villain pounds the superhero into the concrete, and it breaks. I felt pummeled underneath the pressure. It could have bent me in half.

It was the most intense pain ever, but I dragged myself out of the middle of the street because I didn’t want to get run over. It was pretty dark in Highland Park and I rolled onto the grass and reached for my phone and called Brandy Flower. I was only 30 seconds from his house. And I called him and said. ‘I just crashed.’ He said, ‘I know I heard the screams.’

Did you immediately know the extent of the injuries?
That’s the crazy thing. [Flower] said it only looked like I had a few scrapes. My elbows and my knees were bloody, but my face was fine. My head was fine, my neck and my back too. But I felt my left shoulder was dislocated, I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.,

Two firemen dudes showed up in an ambulance and were very unsympathetic. They kept moving and jerking me around and they were like, ‘man, you’re fine, you just have a few cuts.’

I told them my shoulder felt like it had been ripped apart and my stomach feels like my organs are scrambled up inside. They said: ‘Well…did you eat dinner tonight? I’m like, ‘Yeah, at 9:00 p.m. They’re like, “Well, maybe you need to shit.’ You know, making jokes. I’m like, ‘Just get me to the fucking hospital. Please!’

So we get on the fucking road and the freeway is shut. The 110 is shut. So they’re blazing down the back streets. We get to the USC-County medical hospital and there’s gunshot wound victims, all these people around, and nobody’s fucking helping me. And finally, they get me into this back room, I was screaming, ‘Please god, help me,’ the whole time. Well, not screaming but more whimpering because I had no air in my fucking lungs.

You’re still in crazy pain the whole time?
Yeah, no one was giving me any relief, nothing. People were just asking me questions, the same questions.

How long do you think you were waiting?
Forty-five minutes. And then they’re like, ‘We got you a room’–except it wasn’t even a room, it was a hallway. Next thing I know, I’m surrounded by doctors and nurses. People are sticking needles in me, IVs, gels. They’re looking inside me, but they can’t figure out what’s wrong.

I couldn’t breath and asked for oxygen. They gave it to me, but that didn’t help either.

How did they figure out what it was?
A doctor came up and said, ‘He’s hemorrhaging inside. I know it’s got to be internal bleeding. We got to fucking open him up.’

Then the surgeons came out and this woman looked at me and was like, ‘You’re losing a lot of blood.’ I’m like ‘What? No I’m not.’ She said that something inside of me had burst and was bleeding. ‘We got to open you up. Do you have insurance?’

Did you?
Yes. And then they literally cut my pants off, cut my boxers off, and immediately performed surgery.

Were you still processing it at that point?
I didn’t know what the fuck to say. I looked at [Flower] and said, ‘Tell my parents I love them.’ I was trying to get him to record me saying a message to them so that they could hear my voice for one last time.

And they put the mask over me and injected me with some shit and I fell asleep. And I woke up and my mom and dad were on my right side and [Flower] was on my left and they were all standing over me and I could barely see. I had a bunch of IVs in me and I looked down at my scar and saw how gnarly it was, and passed out. I woke up 24 hours later.

It’s crazy to think that if you’d listened to the firemen and just gone back home, you probably never would have woken up. 
They were telling [Flower] to drive me to the hospital. And I was like, insurance. I pay for it. Put me in a fucking ambulance and get me there with your stupid sirens. They said they didn’t want to drive there because the freeway was closed.

Did you get any crazy visions from the morphine?
It was like DMT. As soon as I closed my eyes for one second, I had bullies from high school screaming in my face, teachers that I used to fight with, right face to face, screaming at me. All these fucking pressures coming at me from a million directions. I can’t even describe how vivid the visions were.

So what exactly are the consequences of having no spleen?
I can’t drink or do drugs ever again. I’d quit for a while and when we spoke for the last story, I felt like I was the most lucid I’ve ever been in my life. I felt great. And then all of a sudden, I felt like, I got my record out, time to celebrate.

Read more from the article HERE.